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Authorship – Indie Publishing

Authorship - Indie Publishing
Authorship – Indie Publishing

Authorship – Indie Publishing

A Review – by S. Brown

 

5 Star Review
5 Star Review

 

 It is said that everyone over the age of forty has a story worth writing a book about. OK, that is not what is said exactly, but if you put the two sayings together, that is what comes out, isn’t it? Well, this book, Authorship – How To Publish Your Book On Your Own’ is about indie publishing it.

So, seeing as most people would not have a clue how to go about writing that book and even less of an idea about indie publishing and promoting it, Owen Jones has written this book on authorship to help would-be authors get their book out of themselves and into the hands of the people who would like to read it.

There are many authors who dread publishing their book with the major distributors. Maybe they have tried and failed or just did not understand how to publish a book because of the jargon. The world of book publishing and authorship has its own terminology too as has that of computers.

‘Authorship – Publishing Your Book On Your Own’ by Owen Jones is a manual for would-be writers and existing writers who would like the experience of self-publishing their books themselves instead of paying others to do it for them.

Seen from this point of view, the book is actually in two halves. The first third is about actually writing your novel. How to overcome first-novel- nerves, how to stay motivated and writing a book in general, but he does not dwell on the subject for longer than necessary.

Then we get to the part that most indie-authors need to know – especially those that are not 100% computer literate or au fait with the world of indie publishing. From this point on, the book and it’s author assume that you have a manuscript in electronic format or an ‘escript’ as Mr. Jones calls it.

The book guides you, the writer through the different formatting techniques necessary in order to produce a print-ready copy of your escript and a digital copy for your ebook. It then presents you with the names of the four major printers and distributors that require printed or electronic formats: Amazon, which owns Kindle and CreateSpace; Lulu; Smashwords; and XinXii.

Amazon and Lulu can produce both print and ebook formats, but none of these four major printers and distributors accept escripts in exactly the same format, so the book takes the reader through how to produce the escript required by each printer and distributor.

The book makes the whole business of  production and promotion and indie publishing a book look pretty simple and it sounds far easier to do than the reams of instructions provided by the ‘Big Four’ themselves. The book then proceeds to explain which of these ‘Big Four’ will most likely get your work into Apple’s worldwide iBookstore and Barnes & Noble successfully and which have sold the most for Mr. Jones.

This is valuable information in its own right since two of the ‘Big Four’ charge up to $75 to get you listed in the content of their catalogues and yet the other two do it free of charge. Presumably, once you are in these catalogues you are in, so why pay?

Mr. Jones has published well-over a hundred books on ‘how to…’ do things, a five-part series of 560,000 words, seven novels and twenty-one novellas. This year alone, he has written and published nine books and that is only until August 2015, so I think that we can safely assume that he knows what he is talking about and at $3.99, it is a steal since it could easily save you 20-50 times that on your first indie publishing venture alone.

***** 10/10

See the book in the site bookshop here

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